An anguished cry of “Zoinks!” echoed around the internet last month when DC Entertainment announced a new wave of comics featuring souped-up Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. Here was the Scooby gang as you’d never seen them before, with Shaggy rocking a ridiculous hipster beard and sleeve tattoo and Scoobs rigged up with a cyber-monocle dispersing weird emoji-bubbles. While it would be unfair to judge the aptly named Scooby Apocalypse comic before it debuts in May, the instant backlash served as a reminder that when you’re dealing with classic properties, striking out in a bold new direction can blow up in your face.

Current stewards of the Transformers comics licence, IDW, seems to have cracked how to do it without it backfiring. In 2012, the publisher launched two new titles featuring the robots in disguise and both are about to hit issue 50. While they’ve tinkered with the status quo – a certain iconic Decepticon has switched sides – the comics have never been more popular or more straight-up enjoyable to read. The core book is set on postwar Cybertron, with dinky mascot Bumblebee caught up in House Of Cards-style politicking between three clanking factions amid assassination attempts and unexpected immigration worries. The second book, More Than Meets The Eye, sent a ragged crew of misfit characters – led by nobody’s favourite Rodimus Prime – into deep space on a vague, open-ended quest. It originally sounded about as essential as Star Trek Voyager, but MTMTE’s vivid characterisation, self-referential humour and wicked habit of unexpectedly killing off beloved characters has made it the buzziest of cult favourites. Both titles are about to hit their 50th issues, which will apparently serve as an excellent jumping-on point if you’re ready to get emotionally invested in the lives and loves of wise-cracking toybots.

We’ve already met Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two Marvel heroes scheduled to appear in Netflix’s small-screen team-up The Defenders. The other half of the street-level superhero team, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, may currently be a little less familiar, but they have a long shared history stretching back to the 1970s. As the tiara-wearing Power Man, Cage was originally a street-walking, jive-talking blaxploitation badass, while Danny Rand – AKA mystical martial artist Iron Fist – was a blatant attempt to cash in on the kung-fu craze. When their solo titles started to run out of steam, Marvel put them together in a team-up book called Power Man And Iron Fist, one of the most fondly remembered books of the late 1970s and 1980s and arguably the original superhero bromance. This week Marvel will try to reignite the flame by launching Power Man And Iron Fist as a new ongoing series from writer David Walker and artist Sanford Greene. It’s not a reboot – the characters are older, and there’s not a tiara in sight – but it still channels a pleasingly gritty 1970s vibe, especially as Greene’s character redesigns are so hip and heavily stylised that you can imagine Shaft digging them. Out of costume, this spindly, scratchy-bearded incarnation of Iron Fist could almost pass as classic Shaggy.

Some comics call themselves original but can feel like little more than thinly veiled storyboards for a boilerplate action movie, a procession of ordered, widescreen panels designed to seduce the eye of Hollywood producers. The new Image series Mirror, which launched earlier this month, is something far more dreamlike; an oddball tale of arcane alchemy and experimental vivisection that celebrates the unique storytelling possibilities of comics by warping its panel layouts. They bend, curve and intersect on the page like elaborate stained-glass windows, while the delicate watercolour artwork creates an almost impressionistic feel. It’s a little mindbending, but that’s of a piece with the story, a warped, semi-fantastical fairytale about maudlin humans and altered beasts. A collaboration between Emma Ríos and Hwei Lim – both predominantly known as artists – in which Ríos scripts the main story while Lim creates the art, each instalment also contains a short backup story that sees them swapping roles, adding another layer of meaning to the title. After one issue, it’s not entirely clear where their young mage hero is headed, but the view is beautiful and it will be fascinating to see what they come up with next.

Once a cult web hit, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s series is now the funniest show on TV. They explain how their bumbling slackers became the women everyone wants to be BFFs with – and how Clinton came on board